The War Lords

By Michael Carver

Detailed profiles of forty-three military commanders of the twentieth century, from Patton to Rommel, Yamamoto, and Zhukov, written by top historians.
 
In The War Lords, Field Marshal Lord Carver has assembled an engrossing series of short, detailed biographies of forty-three of the dominant military commanders on the twentieth-century world stage, written by such prominent historians as Alistair Horne, Norman Stone, Stephen Ambrose, Lord Kinross, and Martin Middlebrook. Included are:
 
Field-Marshal the Earl Alexander, E.H.H. Allenby, Claude Auchinleck, Field-Marshal Sir, Omar N. Bradley, General of the Army, Andrew Browne Cunningham, Admiral of the Fleet the Viscount, Karl Doenitz, Admiral, Hugh C.T. Dowding, Air Chief Marshal, Dwight D. Eisenhower, General of the Army, Ferdinand Foch, Bernard Freyberg, Lieutenant-General Lord, Heinz Guderian, General, Douglas Haig, William F. Halsey, Fleet Admiral, Ian Hamilton, Arthur Harris, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir, Paul von Hindenburg, John Rushworth Jellicoe, Joseph Joffre, Alphonse Juin, Marshal, Mustafa Kemal, Ivan Koniev, Marshal, Erich Ludendorff, Douglas C. MacArthur, General of the Army, John Monash, Bernard L. Montgomery, of Alamein, Louis Mountbatten, Earl of Burma, Chester W. Nimitz, Fleet Admiral, George S. Patton, General, John J. Pershing, Philippe Petain, Erwin Rommel, Field-Marshal, William Joseph Slim, Field-Marshal the Viscount, Carl A. Spaatz, General, Raymond A. Spruance, Admiral, Joseph W. Stilwell, General, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Tedder, Hugh Trenchard, Erich Von Falkenhayn, Erich Von Manstein, Field Marshal, Gerd Von Rundstedt, Field-Marshal, Archibald Wavell, Field-Marshal Earl, Isoroku Yamamoto, Admiral & Georgii Zhukov, Marshal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 30, 2005
• ISBN: 9781473819740

Michael Carver

Michael Carver works and lives in Chapel Hill, NC. Michael is both a local musician and a federal contractor in information technology. Michael received a Master of Science in technical writing and editing. When Michael isn’t writing or conducting, you’ll find him out on his boat with his partner, Brad, and their four-legged daughter, “Miss Bella.”

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Field-Marshal Sir Michael Carver,

General Editor

The twentieth century has brought new dimensions to war. This book sets out to show how the major military figures in the two world wars of the first half of the century attempted to direct war in conditions which, certainly as far as the First World War was concerned, were unfamiliar. The pace of change was fast and the military profession tends to be conservative between wars for lack of opportunity to test itself in changing conditions. In war change is so rapid that it is difficult for anybody to adapt himself to it; but adapt themselves the participants must and do.

Wars greatly accelerate the pace of technical development, but new weapons and developments are usually superimposed on the old, leading to a considerable period of overlap. A new weapon produces its own counter-weapon and the older ones continue to exist side by side with it. The motor vehicle and the aeroplane were both in use in 1914; but even at the end of the Second World War the bulk of transport of both the German and Russian armies was horsed. Even in the age of the nuclear weapon, the rifle and the bayonet, derivative of the pike, are still in service and the former at least in many ways more relevant to the conflicts of the second half of the century than almost all the other weapons that have been added to the soldier’s armoury in the three-quarters of the twentieth century that have passed.

The figures described here are the commanders: not, with some exceptions, the high staff officers who from their desks and in constant struggle with their political masters directed policy. Not that these Chiefs of Staff are not worthy of study, but their actions and reactions were so intimately entwined with the political history of the wars that it is unreal to attempt to deal with them as characters in isolation, fascinating as some of them and their relations with the politicians were. Some of them appear in these pages, having started as commanders in the field or at sea and progressed from there to the council table.

As late as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, kings and princes took the field as commanders and the direction of land operations at least was still regarded, except in Britain and America, as a field in which royalty could properly exercise its authority. When Winston Churchill was at his lowest ebb in July 1942, it was seriously suggested in a motion in the House of Commons that the Duke of Gloucester should assume supreme command. Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, who was in command of a German army group in 1918, was the last relic of a system of command which had been accepted for centuries. Mountbatten in the Second World War gained his place purely on his professional ability, not on account of his royal connection.

The optimum balance between political direction and military command of operations can hardly be said to have been satisfactorily found in the First World War at any stage. Accepting a misinterpretation of Clausewitz, which implied that once war had been declared the soldiers and sailors took over direction, and the politicians took a back seat until victory (or defeat) was achieved, the tendency for the first few years was for the politicians meekly to accept that the demands of the military men must be met and all shoulders put to the wheel to achieve them. When things went badly they muttered and fussed, but took no real political initiative and sought no other way out of the apparent impasse into which the military machine had ground itself, like a driver continuing to spin his wheels deeper and deeper into the bog.

Only when the sacrifices were becoming intolerable, and no end appeared to be in sight, did men like Clemenceau and Lloyd George begin to take a real grip of affairs. Even then they did it in a roundabout way. By 1914 governments were only just beginning to concern themselves with the direction of industrial, commercial and financial affairs. The volume and the detail of work which the direction of a major war involved, and the short time scale within which it had to be tackled, were totally unfamiliar to the political and governmental machines of 1914. It is little wonder that in all the participating nations the direction of a war involving such vast resources was haphazard and inefficient. The attempt to solve the myriad problems greatly increased the degree of governmental involvement in national life, and had a profound effect on events both during and after the war in all countries.

Railways and the telegraph had affected the American Civil War and Bismarck’s Prussian wars of the late nineteenth century. The Russo-Japanese War in the first years of the twentieth century had given significant pointers to the influence of the industrial processes of the rapidly developing engineering industry based on steel; but the full impact of the Industrial Revolution on warfare was not to be seen until the First World War. Tactics, and strategy too, were still in 1914 based on Napoleonic concepts, which in the event it was found impossible to apply. The result on land was the development of a mutual mass mincing-machine into which bodies, weapons and ammunition were poured in the hope that the other side would be exhausted first, as in the end it was; but at a cost to European civilisation far outweighing the trivial causes for which the opponents had plunged into war.

Although the military figures of the First World War loomed large in the public eye at the time, and have been the subject of much controversy since, their positive contribution either to the actual outcome of operations or to the art of war was small. Even Allenby, who seemed to restore mobility and sense to war in Palestine towards the end, served in retrospect only to preserve for several decades the existence of horsed cavalry long after its ability to influence events on the battlefield had been rendered nugatory by modern weapons combined with man-made obstacles. Foch, perhaps the most intellectual and theoretical of all those described here, made his mark as much by sheer enthusiasm and the knowledge that he had the powerful political backing of both Clemenceau and Lloyd George as by the acuteness of his perception or the originality of his decisions.

That the conditions of warfare in the First World War overwhelmed the participants is not surprising. The means of transport available, and the short distance between base and front line, permitted the deployment of hordes of men and mountains of material. Not only was the latter available in large quantities (although never enough to satisfy the consumers), but it included entirely novel developments: the motor car and all its variants up to and including the tank; the aeroplane; radio-telephony; the submarine – all in use for the first time in Europe. The machine gun, the mine, gas, greatly improved explosives: all these added complications not only to the direction of operations, but also to their logistic support and to the problems of industrial production and the labour required for it.

Little wonder therefore that the senior military figures did not immediately grasp the correct potentialities of these new weapons, not always as great as their inventors or enthusiastic supporters claimed.

If there is one characteristic which stands out in the battles of 1914–18, it is the almost total lack of control once the battle had started. Communication invariably broke down. Very few commanders at any level had the faintest idea about what had happened or what was happening on their own side, let alone ‘on the other side of the hill’. Even if they had reserves which could physically be moved in time to influence the battle, they hardly ever had good enough information on which to do so. The result often was just to pour more meat into the mincing-machine, reinforcing loss, there being no success to exploit.

All these melancholy facts of life were well known to the generals and admirals of the Second World War, all of whom had had direct experience of the first. Only the air marshals were operating in an almost totally new environment, so great had been the developments in aircraft and air warfare between 1918 and 1939. Nevertheless there were factors that made the Second World War very different from its predecessor. The most significant differences were in the field of radio communications, notably the development of radar; of automotive vehicles, especially the tank and many other forms of tracked and wheeled cross-country vehicle; and above all of air power, which had a far more revolutionary effect on naval warfare than it did on land or as a form of warfare in its own right. Nevertheless its effect on land warfare, although often exaggerated, had continually to be taken into account and particularly on movement to the battlefield by sea, land and air. As a very rough generalisation it can be said that the Germans had adapted themselves best to these new developments in land warfare, the British in air warfare and the United States in naval warfare.

In the Second World War, political control of military operations was exercised much more closely and directly, in spite of the fact that the battlefields were farther-flung. Churchill, Hitler and Stalin were supreme war lords and intervened (generals, admirals and air marshals would say interfered) in considerable detail. Chiang Kai-shek exercised the same direct control, although not very effectively. Roosevelt, although titular Commander-in-Chief, was less inclined to involve himself in the detail of military operations or to override the advice of his Chiefs of Staff; Admiral Leahy playing as significant a role with him as paramilitary éminence grise, as General Ismay did with Churchill.

The First World War was not truly a world war. It was really a European war, although its ripples spread widely. In contrast number two was, when Japan entered the lists at the end of 1941, truly a world war. However, if one is to bring it into focus and study it objectively, one must divide it into separate campaigns. First the western European land war: 1940 saw it break fitfully into full development and then die, until revived in 1944 with the invasion of Normandy. Second, the Mediterranean land-air-sea war: this began with entry of Italy into the lists as France fell; saw the ebb and flow of the war in Greece and North Africa; and finished with the slogging match in Italy. Third, the submarine war in the Atlantic. Fourth, the air war over western Europe. Fifth, the Russo-German conflict. Sixth, the China-Japan-South-East-Asia land-air-sea war; and finally the Americo-Japanese sea-air-island war.

These were basically separate wars, but inevitably interrelated, the connecting link being the resources with which they were fought: the men, the material and the means of moving both about. The war in the Mediterranean did not assume any great importance to the Germans until it threatened, and then led to, the collapse of the Italians. From 1941 onwards the Russian front was far and away the greatest German commitment, and it remained so to the end, even after the Anglo-American entry into France added a coup de grâce.

The war against Japan was in essence a continuation and development of Japan’s invasion of China, following on that of Manchuria in the 1930s. After Pearl Harbor the Pacific war became a major preoccupation of the United States, and involved them in support of Chiang Kai-shek, with implications that have lasted well into the second half of the century. The Japanese advance into South-East Asia had dramatic short- and long-term effects on the British Empire east of Suez, and on the whole concept of imperial defence that had been enshrined in British military textbooks since the formation of the Committee of Imperial Defence early in the century. This man was totally unrelated, as far as the Japanese were concerned, to the war being fought by the other members of the Axis west of Suez, although this had very significant effects on the resources which their opponents could deploy.

So much for the wars which included all three elements. In addition to these, there were two single-service wars waged almost independently of the others: the submarine war, fought principally in the Atlantic between the German and British and later also the American navies with air force participation; and the air-bombing war, first the Germans against Britain, parried by RAF Fighter Command and the army’s Anti-Aircraft Command; and then, in retaliation, Bomber Command, later joined by their USAF colleagues, against Germany, with other targets rather reluctantly added.

The submarine war was a matter of life and death. It was Germany’s one hope of bringing the British war effort to an end before America could develop and deploy its strength in Europe. No other campaign had such a direct importance to Britain and its war effort. In contrast the air-bombing war, although highly unpleasant to those who lived where the bombs fell, had only a marginal effect. Airmen and others will argue for ever about its value: whether or not, if differently conducted, it could have been more effective; the amount of war effort it involved or diverted. It was not able, as its most fervent advocates had predicted, to replace the pressures of land warfare or of naval blockade. It probably hardened rather than softened the morale of the enemy population. Whatever its value, it is indisputable that between the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 and the return to France on D-Day 1944, Britain had to find some way of fighting Germany. Running up and down the desert coast of North Africa was not enough. The bombing campaign was a necessity for national morale if for nothing else.

The entry of the air force as a third element in war greatly complicated the difficulty of directing and controlling military operations at the strategic level. It had been difficult enough in the First World War to resolve the conflicting demands of sailors and soldiers, especially with eccentrics like Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher around. In the Second World War it was infinitely more complicated and difficult. Nowhere was it really satisfactorily achieved. The British devotion to a committee system survived for a long time, but under American pressure gave way to the concept of the supreme commander overlording land, air and, to a certain but rather limited degree, naval forces (unless he were himself an admiral, as Nimitz was). This did not solve all the problems and conflicts by any means, particularly if Montgomery was one of the subordinates, but it at least produced one point of decision and access. In fact successive army commanders-in-chief in the Middle East – Wavell, Auchinleck and Alexander – acted and were treated by Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff as if they were supreme commanders.

Much play has been made of the dangers of the German system, by which the OKW, the supreme joint command, overlorded the OKH, the supreme army command, taking decisions which it was alleged were unrealistic and divorced from reality. There is no doubt that, particularly as far as the Russian front was concerned, there was confusion as to where the point of decision lay; but this was due as much if not more to Hitler’s deliberate system of not allowing any individual commander or headquarters to exercise too much independence than to defects in the organisation. Since 1945 all major military nations, including our own, have adopted the supreme commander concept for command in the field or its equivalent, and have instituted a chairman or chief of defence staff to preside over their single-service chiefs of staff. It was the lack of direct representation of the single-service staffs in the OKW which, apart from the idiosyncrasies of Hitler’s methods of command, was its fatal flaw.

Disagreements, arguments, conflicts of interest and requirements between the three services were a continuing theme in all the warring nations. Overlying these were the differences between allies on both sides, each wanting a lion’s share of the resources available, each keeping its eye open for its own postwar interests and each seeking the limelight and the glory. The Allies had more trouble on this score than the Axis, reduced as it was virtually to two, although Italy was a constant source of annoyance and liability to Germany.

The war lords of the Second World War described here are principally British, German and American. Russia contributes two and Japan only one, not because they did not play a major part in the military operations of the war, but because of the difficulties of finding enough material to provide a balanced picture of them. France, so prominent in the First World War, was virtually a non-combatant until the final phases, as the United States was in the first, and none of its military commanders then exercised influence on military operations on a truly major scale. De Gaulle did so in the political sphere as did Pétain, and fleetingly Darlan; but in this book we are not directly concerned with that scene.

With few exceptions the admirals, generals and air marshals of the Second World War shared one motive, a determination that their operations should not resemble those of their predecessors. Their reaction took different forms. The admirals, particularly in the submarine war, had the greatest difficulty in escaping from the old pattern; but in the US Navy the aircraft-carrier had become the battleship and the Pacific its perfect sphere of action. Some generals, inspired by Lawrence and Liddell Hart, put their trust in mobility, dispersion, deception and special forces. Wavell and Auchinleck were of this school; they and their desert generals were unfortunate to be faced, in Rommel, with one who had mastered it better than they. Patton later had more luck. Others were more traditional and sought the answer in a more efficient and cautious application of First World War methods, aided by all the additions, especially to fire power, that modern invention could provide. They, coming later when material was in greater abundance, were more fortunate. Alexander, Montgomery and Freyberg were of this school, as were Eisenhower and his principal lieutenants. Slim combined the best of both.

The air marshals had originally hoped that the power they exercised would make the war a short affair and avoid the need both for long-drawn-out land campaigns, with their long casualty lists and limitless logistic demands, and for extended naval campaigns of attrition as well as fleet actions. Although the influence of air power on both land and sea operations was greater than the generals and admirals had been prepared to envisage, the airmen were sadly disappointed, and saw with horror the danger that they might be forced to revert to the fate from which Smuts and Trenchard had helped them to escape, that of being merely the servants of the navy and the army. They soon found that they had sorely underestimated the strength they needed to make an impact either on the enemy’s economy or on his fighting potential, and that the defence, in the form of the fighter and the anti-aircraft gun, constantly threatened to stultify the attack, on which their strategy fundamentally depended. This was particularly so once radar was introduced and as electronic warfare developed.

Amphibious and seaborne operations played a larger part than in any previous war. The Americans became masters of the art in the Pacific, while as Chief of Combined Operations Mountbatten laid the foundations for the major operations undertaken by British and American forces first in the Mediterranean and then across the Channel It was ironic that, having been appointed Supreme Commander South-East Asia Command, he was denied the resources to apply his expertise. He had to be content with supervising a jungle war in which air supply played a significant role, and with exercising his diplomatic talents in attempting to co-ordinate operations with Stilwell, who was nominally also subordinate to Chiang Kai-shek, but continually quarrelled with him and with General Wedemeyer, the American air commander, as well as with almost everybody else.

The war lords of the First World War never overcame the environment in which they fought, and were dominated by it. Those of the Second World War, with stronger and more determined political support, did better. It is possible to imagine the first war ending, say, in 1916 or 1917 and Europe and its component nations being no worse off, even better off, than they were when it actually finished towards the end of 1918.

If the Second World War had ended at any period before Hitler and his regime had been clearly and totally defeated, Europe and the world would have become a very different place. Given the state of military preparedness of the British, French, Russians and Americans in 1939, it is difficult to see how victory could have been achieved much sooner or at much less cost than it was, certainly once Japan had entered the lists. For this economy of effort the war lords of the Second World War, in comparison with those of the first, deserve some credit.

The choice of figures to be portrayed in this gallery has not been an easy task. It is open to criticism and has already been subjected to it. My first short list included a hundred names, a number clearly beyond the limit of a manageable volume. I had therefore to impose criteria to narrow the field, and chose to exclude those who were perhaps more truly ‘war lords’ in that they directed policy at the highest level. The principal criterion was that the man should have exercised command of a considerable force – land, sea or air – in an important campaign: a secondary one was to see that as many different campaigns as possible of the two world wars were covered; that duplication was avoided and that the subjects themselves were of interest. Pressure of space forced me to concentrate on the two world wars and to exclude such important operations as the Russo-Japanese and Sino-Japanese wars, and the guerrilla and anti-terrorist campaigns of the second half of the century.

These criteria have therefore excluded Lawrence, Wingate, Tito, Mao Tsetung, as they have Alanbrooke, Portal, Pound, Marshall, King, Arnold and Chiang Kai-shek.

Even after the application of this strict self-discipline, the space left for the authors to describe the character and achievements of a military figure of major importance is very limited. The authors’ task has therefore been a particularly difficult one. It will be found that different authors have chosen different ways of meeting the problem: uniformity of approach has not been demanded. I am grateful to them all for the pains they have taken to meet the severity of the limits imposed upon them and for the skill and ingenuity they have employed.

ADMIRAL OF THE FLEET THE EARL JELLICOE

A. Temple Patterson

When John Rushworth Jellicoe became the first British admiral to hold supreme command at sea in modern war, the problems that faced him were enormous. Long generations of supremacy at sea had been followed by a hundred years which saw on the one hand virtually no major sea battles and on the other a naval revolution involving the introduction of steam, steel, long-range guns, mines, torpedoes, wireless, submarines and even the first aircraft. The weapons and in many cases the methods that had brought victory in the past were obsolete, but the traditions and popular mythology of the triumphant age of sail lingered on. A nation and a navy bred to believe themselves invincible at sea looked to him to repeat the glories of the past. Yet he himself understood better than most some of the great difficulties that stood in the way. Rodney, Howe and Nelson had after all worked with factors known and familiar. Those with which a twentieth-century admiral had to cope were still largely imponderables, menacing uncertainties on which the recent Russo-Japanese War could throw little light.

Moreover Jellicoe knew the rapid progress and technical efficiency of the German navy, unhampered by ancient habits and traditions, and at least suspected its superiority in several important respects – better armour protection, completer watertight subdivision of its capital ships and the penetrative power of its shells. War was to reveal that its submarines had a greater radius of operation and its torpedoes and mines were better than the British. Even in gunnery, on which together with the unromantic advantage of numerical supremacy Jellicoe relied for victory, the German director pointer gave an advantage in poor visibility, and Jutland showed up other German superiorities, in night-fighting practice and signalling.

In part at least, British inferiority in technical matters stemmed from the inferior status then accorded to engineers and technicians in the Royal Navy. Although its German opponents were more alive to the effects of the technological revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – indeed the material superiority of the German navy may be considered a reflection of Germany’s lead over Britain in this ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ – the British Sea Lords and higher command continued to be drawn exclusively from the executive or seaman branch of the service until after the Second World War.

Jellicoe’s difficulties were even greater than he himself realised, for with all his talents he was a prisoner of his time and training, freer than many others from inherited fetishes and obsessions but still not wholly free. Nevertheless he grasped the realities of the situation well enough for his sense of the vastness of his responsibilities to impose on him a ceaseless strain. Furthermore the time required for even an able man marked out for advancement to climb the ladder of promotion brought these responsibilities upon him at a time when his powers were perhaps beginning to pass their peak, and the result was a burden that might well have bent the shoulders of an Atlas.

Born at Southampton in 1859, the son of a liner captain who became commodore of the Royal Mail Company’s fleet and a local doctor’s daughter whose relatives included several naval officers, Jellicoe had set his heart on a naval career from early boyhood. Entering the training ship Britannia at the age of twelve, he earned the reputation of being ‘one of the cleverest cadets the ship has ever had’. As a young lieutenant he developed a passion for gunnery, then a sadly neglected branch of the service, and during his course at Whale Island gunnery school his abilities caught the eye of its captain, the formidable reformer ‘Jacky’ Fisher. Appointed to the staff of the school, he became Fisher’s most prized protégé; but although Fisher played a great part in moulding his career he was never regarded in the navy as having owed his advancement merely to favouritism. His ability, industry, pleasant personality and powers of leadership were widely recognised, and Fisher was by no means the only senior officer who soon appreciated his outstanding potentialities.

Thenceforward his career alternated between service at sea and in the Admiralty. In 1904 Fisher became First Sea Lord, and his reforms opened a new era in the navy’s history, of which he became the presiding genius, while Jellicoe developed into his right-hand man. In 1908 he was appointed Controller, in which post he was responsible for superintending the departments that built, fitted out and repaired ships. He soon realised and sought to make others realise that the German dreadnoughts then being built were probably superior to their British rivals. It was true that they were less heavily gunned, but, as Jellicoe repeatedly emphasised, if in ships of equal displacement the British put more weight into gun armament the German ships must have advantages in some other directions. These he had deduced were the better armour protection and the compléter watertight subdivision below water already referred to. Their greater beam facilitated these advantages, for whereas British vessels were limited by the width of our existing docks, the Germans were building their docks to take their ships and not their ships to fit their docks. Jellicoe, however, at least managed to secure approval for the construction of two floating docks capable of taking the largest battleships for repair purposes.

He was also uneasy about the relative ineffectiveness at long range and therefore oblique impact of the shells fired by the heavy guns of the British. Trials he arranged in 1910 showed that in many cases the shells burst on impact without penetrating the target’s armour. He therefore asked the Ordnance Board to produce an armour-piercing shell that would be more adequate to the long ranges at which future sea battles would be fought, but unhappily his term as Controller ended soon afterwards and his successor let the matter drop, nor did Jellicoe revive it when he became Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, until the battle of Jutland belatedly and tragically underlined its importance.

The Controllership was followed by two years in command of the Atlantic Fleet. By now Fisher had decided that here was the man to lead Britain’s battlefleet in the war with Germany he was convinced must come, and was describing Jellicoe in his correspondence as the future Nelson. His next step forward, in 1911, was the command of the 2nd Division of the Home Fleet under Sir George Callaghan. The importance of this appointment to Fisher’s mind was that it would almost automatically make Jellicoe Callaghan’s successor as C-in-C of this fleet. Thus he would be where Fisher wanted him in time for the clash with Germany and the great sea battle he expected, to which he was now alluding apocalyptically as Armageddon. Though no longer First Sea Lord, he was acting as unofficial adviser to the new First Lord, Winston Churchill, whom he had persuaded to promote Jellicoe (at that moment twenty-first on the list of twenty-two vice-admirals) over the heads of all those senior to him to the command in question.

Already, however, while commanding the Atlantic Fleet in combined exercises, Jellicoe had written with distaste of a night action which had been included: ‘The difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe and the exceeding uncertainty of the result confirmed the opinion I had long held that a night action was a pure lottery, more particularly if destroyers took part in it.’ To this judgement may doubtless be traced his omission when C-in-C to train the Grand Fleet in night action.

On the other hand at this time he was by no means wedded to the single line-ahead formation which was then the navy’s basic principle of battle, nor opposed either to independent action by squadrons such as Admiral Sir William May and his flag-captain Herbert Richmond were advocating and May even tried out in manoeuvres, or to the creation of special fast squadrons. On one occasion during the 1912 manoeuvres under Callaghan’s command he departed without orders from the line-ahead and took successful action with his squadron against the ‘enemy’s’ rear, his chief subsequently approving. Again, in the secret War Orders and Dispositions he drew up for the flag-officers and captains under his own command, he definitely envisaged the employment of fast divisions, placed if possible on either wing during the approach to battle, to make separate attacks if circumstances were favourable.

In the 1913 manoeuvres he gave a brilliant performance as commander of the Red Fleet representing a hostile force convoying and clearing the way for an invading army. Outmanoeuvring Admiral Callaghan who commanded the defending Blue Fleet, he landed the troops he was escorting in the Humber and on the north-east coast, with the result that the manoeuvres were hurriedly ended lest they should give information and encouragement to Germany. It seems likely, indeed, that he was then at the peak of his powers, not yet worn down as he was to be later by long-continued strain and anxieties. Nevertheless his inclination to caution and in particular his strong sense of the dangers to be feared from submarines in modern naval warfare must have been intensified soon afterwards by a memorandum on these dangers which Fisher sent him. Although his mind was very far from being a mere tabula rasa for the reception of Fisher’s ideas, it is probable that his anxieties and eventual pessimism on this subject owed something to his mentor’s views.

When war broke out in 1914 he duly took over from Callaghan the command of what was renamed the Grand Fleet. Fifty-four years of age, he was a small, spare, wiry, alert and vigorous man, a dedicated worker with great technical knowledge and a first-class administrator who might have been a superlative one but for his excessive concern for details and the difficulty he found in delegating responsibilty. Moreover throughout his career he had been occupied more with the matériel and administrative sides of his profession than with strategy and tactics; and, though he was gifted in these too, his approach to them was rather empirical since he was not well read in naval history. Though capable of bold actions he inclined instinctively to orthodoxy and tradition, and his tendency to caution was henceforth reinforced by an oppressive sense of the vital importance of his task. But he inspired affection and trust in officers and men alike, endearing himself to the lower deck by his care for their welfare and kindling in his senior officers reliance on his leadership and often personal devotion.

Public opinion in Britain, and on the whole naval opinion also, had expected a major sea battle to be fought almost at once and result in a great British victory. But the German High Seas Fleet did not come out and Fisher’s Armageddon was not fought. Instead the Germans preferred to keep their fleet in harbour or in the Baltic, ready to sally forth at any favourable moment. Among the advantages of this strategy of a ‘fleet in being’ was that while Jellicoe had always to keep as many as possible of his ships in a state of readiness in case the enemy left harbour, for his German opponent this was necessary only when he intended to come out. Since the Grand Fleet was liable at any time to have at least a dozen vessels refitting and others temporarily disabled or detached, the possibility that the Germans might have equality or even superiority at their ‘selected moment’ caused Jellicoe constant anxiety. Moreover the enemy could hope, while waiting for their ‘day’, to whittle down the British preponderance in capital ships by mining and submarine attacks and perhaps by catching some part of the Grand Fleet at a disadvantage.

On the other hand Britain’s geographical position and overall numerical superiority seemed at first sufficient to gain without battle her main strategic aims at sea – the economic blockade of Germany, the security of her own seaborne commerce, and safety from invasion on any dangerous scale. It was true that on Jellicoe’s advice all idea of a close blockade of the enemy’s ports had been abandoned on the very eve of the war; but it was unnecessary to bottle up the High Seas Fleet in its harbours provided that its surface ships at least could be confined to the North Sea and kept from doing any considerable damage there. What in fact had to be achieved was a blockade, not of the German harbours, but of the North Sea. The means employed were the holding of its two exits, the Dover Straits by a mine barrage and a patrol with the Channel Fleet to back them, and the wider passage between the Shetlands and the Norwegian coast by a patrolling squadron of cruisers with the Grand Fleet available in case of a major German venture. This meant that the enemy had a considerable but precarious freedom of movement within the North Sea, but that in at least its northern waters Jellicoe could make sweeps in the hope of catching the High Seas Fleet or some part of it at sea – as his dashing subordinate Vice-Admiral Beatty did, though with incomplete success, in the battlecruiser fight off the Dogger Bank. Only after the Germans realised and began to exploit the potentialities of the submarine did a different and almost reversed situation emerge, with a new and highly dangerous form of counter-blockade operating against Britain.

As yet Jellicoe did not see the threat which submarines could pose to our seaborne trade, and his concern about them and about mines was limited to the damage he feared they could do to the battlefleet. This concern, and a resultant reaction towards cautious orthodoxy, appeared in the battle orders he drew up in the first weeks of the war. He still laid down that squadron commanders had discretionary powers to act independently in certain circumstances, but the use of separate fast divisions he had formerly proposed was ruled out for the time being, though the idea of a detachable division reappeared before Jutland with the creation of the fast Fifth Battle Squadron; and he pronounced that ‘generally speaking, so long as the action is being fought on approximately parallel courses, the whole fleet should form one line of battle’. A few weeks later he took care to make plain, first in a letter to Churchill and then more explicitly in a memorandum to the Admiralty, the cautious strategy and tactics he intended to follow in order to shun or guard against any danger that threatened to reduce or destroy the superiority in numbers that was his chief asset. In the part of the memorandum dealing with his proposed battle tactics he wrote:

If… the enemy battlefleet were to turn away… I should assume that the intention was to lead us over mines and submarines, and should decline to be so drawn … This … may be deemed a refusal of battle, and indeed might result in failure to bring the enemy to action as soon as is expected and hoped … but with new and untried methods of warfare new tactics must be devised to meet them; [though] I feel that such tactics, if not understood, may bring odium upon me.

To this declaration, with its prophetic closing words, both Churchill and the Board replied in terms of full approval.

There followed twenty months of waiting and watching, gunnery practice, fleet exercises and multifarious anxieties, during which Jellicoe’s health began to deteriorate somewhat. By the spring of 1916, though confidence in him was still widespread in the navy, discontent with his seemingly unenterprising strategy was growing in certain quarters outside the service and could even be found within it. The mounting pressure for more offensive moves led to two attempts to lure the High Seas Fleet out by seaplane raids on a Zeppelin base in Schleswig with covering forces supported by the battlecruisers and more remotely by the Grand Fleet. In these Jellicoe had little faith, pointing out that even after a dawn raid it was very unlikely that the German battle-fleet would be contacted before 5 pm or later, much too late for any decision to be reached.

Meanwhile on the German side a new and more enterprising C-in-C, Vice-Admiral Reinhard Scheer, had begun a series of cautious sorties in which he sought to trap and destroy a part of the British fleet and so achieve the long-desired parity of forces. On 31 May one of these led to the battle of Jutland. On the previous day one of his signals had been intercepted and decoded, enabling the Admiralty to warn Jellicoe that the High Seas Fleet would probably put to sea early on the morrow. Thus he was able to leave harbour that night, giving Beatty, who for some time had been stationed at Rosyth with his battlecruisers and the Fifth Battle Squadron, his expected position at 2 pm on the 31st and instructing him to be 69 miles SSE of it at that hour.

Shortly before, Jellicoe had issued revised battle orders based on three dominant conceptions: subordination of the offensive spirit to defensive precautions, especially against torpedoes; the single line of battle; and centralised command. In considering the first it must be realised that his wariness about torpedoes, mines and submarines was still common to practically the whole navy, and that although the war was to show that the submarine’s limitations prevented it from being used effectively with a battlefleet, this was not yet evident in 1916. He was in fact unaware that the Germans had never practised using submarines in co-operation with the High Seas Fleet in action and still considered that the possibility of their retreating and attempting to lead him over a trap of mines and submarines must always be guarded against. This manoeuvre he believed that they would cover by a smokescreen and a torpedo attack by destroyers to which the counter would be to turn temporarily away from the enemy. Both this and the alternative turn towards a torpedo attack, relying on ‘combing’ the torpedoes by individual ships steering so that they passed between them, had been practised before the war; but though the latter prevented losing touch with the enemy the turn-away was considered safer.

The return to the orthodox single line-ahead battle formation rested on the considerations that manoeuvring in separate squadrons with the aim of concentrating on a part of the enemy’s line and overwhelming it involved the risk that a squadron operating independently might itself be overwhelmed by a concentrated enemy; that the high speeds and increased battle ranges of modern ships would make it practically impossible for a C-in-C to keep control of squadrons operating separately; and that these increased ranges had made it possible to achieve the desired concentration of fire on a part of the enemy while maintaining the single line-ahead. This was particularly the case if the manoeuvre of ‘crossing the T’, or placing a fleet in single line athwart the enemy’s line of advance, could be executed. Since the line-ahead formation implied reliance on the big gun for victory and tactics were then largely dominated by gunnery officers like Jellicoe himself, it is scarcely surprising that it won general approval.

The third dominant idea, centralised control, was closely linked with the single line-ahead, which it was claimed was the only safe way of ensuring it. By the beginning of the twentieth century it was being carried to extremes and the subsequent introduction of wireless telegraphy strengthened it further, at the cost of stifling the initiative of subordinates. Jellicoe still laid down that his divisional commanders had discretionary powers in certain circumstances, but the very fact that he described these carefully may have caused them to be regarded as the only cases in which individual action was justified. Moreover most of his subordinates had been too much schooled in the prevailing tradition of ‘orders are orders’ to be able to take advantage of such decentralisation as was offered them.

To quote the distinguished American naval historian Professor Marder:

[Jellicoe] would seek a decision through a formal, long-range, heavy-gun duel on parallel lines in broad daylight. As he would have been the first to admit, the plan of battle and the subsidiary tactics were conservative and cautious … Yet, given the stakes and the dangers of new and sinister underwater weapons, who can say without drawing on knowledge not available to Jellicoe that they were excessively cautious? … They represented after all the tactical ideas of the time and were based largely on academic peacetime exercises and manoeuvres … It needed the gruelling test of battle experience to suggest modifications.

Jellicoe’s plan of battle, however, was based on the assumption that the Germans either wanted to stand and fight or could be compelled to do so. This meant that if they did not, and could not be compelled, time and sea-room would be needed to achieve victory by the orthodox methods, and neither was available on 31 May.

Throughout the battle he also suffered disastrously from signalling shortcomings, at the hands of both the Admiralty and most of his subordinates. These began with an egregious blunder by the Director of Naval Operations, who sent him a signal on the morning of the 31st that the German flagship was still in port. Besides causing Jellicoe to slacken speed in order to economise destroyer fuel and so reducing further the limited daylight he would have for fighting, this shook his faith, after the High Seas Fleet was encountered well out to sea not very long afterwards, in any subsequent information passed to him by the Admiralty, at least when it conflicted with what he had from other sources.

The next major signalling failure occurred after the battlecruiser action which formed the first phase of the battle. Although Beatty despite his early losses had gallantly managed to lead the German fleet on to Jellicoe’s guns without its becoming aware that the whole Grand Fleet was at sea, he had not kept his chief accurately informed of the enemy’s position, formation and strength, partly because his flagship’s wireless gear was shot away. Thus, when Jellicoe sighted Scheer almost at the last moment, he was still in his cruising formation of six columns in line-ahead disposed abeam, with only a minute in which to decide on the form and direction of his deployment. Nevertheless his instantaneous decision to deploy on his port column, though it increased the range and delayed the crunch of the battle when already only two or three hours of daylight remained, gave him three cardinal advantages: crossing Scheer’s ‘T’, gaining the better visibility and getting between Scheer and his bases with the prospect of a whole morrow’s battle if no decision was reached that evening. It has therefore received general retrospective approval, including that of Lord Cunningham, the greatest British seaman of the Second World War.

There followed two brief main-fleet encounters, in each of which the position Jellicoe had seized subjected Scheer to a heavy and accurate fire to which he could make little reply. He extricated himself from both, however, by the simultaneous sixteen-point turns-about which the High Seas Fleet had previously practised, covering himself each time by a destroyer attack and a smokescreen. This smoke and the prevailing mist prevented Jellicoe both times from grasping immediately what had happened; but when after a few minutes in each case he realised that the enemy had made some sort of turn-away, he knew that this could hardly be intended to lead him over mines or submarines, since he had established contact by surprise and they could therefore have had no time to prepare a minefield or a submarine trap. Nevertheless one of his two alternatives, a turn to follow them, was still virtually ruled out by the general acceptance of the view that immediate pursuit of a retreating foe (in fact the classic ‘stern chase’) was practically precluded by the danger from torpedoes. The other alternative was to keep between the enemy and their bases; and this, after a temporary turn-away to avoid the destroyers’ torpedoes, was what he did. As Beatty’s flag-captain Chatfield, who was no partisan of Jellicoe’s, wrote later: ‘Most experienced commanders would probably have acted as he did. His was a weapon on which the world depended, and … he was not prepared to take immeasurable risks with it.’ Churchill put it more pithily: ‘He could have lost the war in an afternoon.’

Determined to avoid his bête noire of a night action for which the Grand Fleet was neither equipped nor trained, Jellicoe intended to remain between the enemy and their ports till morning enabled him to renew the action. But three things, only one of which can be laid to his charge, frustrated him. First, though the least important since without the other two it would hardly have mattered, he misjudged the route Scheer would take home, guarding the two which seemed most likely and discounting that via Horns Reef. Secondly the Admiralty, after intercepting and decoding three signals from Scheer one of which made his intention obvious by asking for airship reconnaissance off Horns Reef next morning, sent Jellicoe a summary of the three which omitted this vital fact. Even then it would have sufficed, if the course it reported Scheer to be taking had been plotted from his known position at dark, to tell Jellicoe his objective, had not the C-in-C’s confidence in Admiralty signals been shaken by its morning message and another subsequent piece of misinformation. Lastly there was the most fatal of the signalling failures, when in the night Scheer forced his way home past the British rear in a series of short though violent clashes involving only light forces on the British side. Amazingly, neither these nor several capital ships which had an inkling of what was happening managed to report it to Jellicoe. As a result Scheer got clear away. Not he alone but the stars in their courses had fought against Jellicoe.

Tactically the battle was indecisive, since neither side dealt the other a crippling blow. But though the High Seas Fleet had earned considerable credit, it had not achieved its objective of obtaining parity or near-parity of forces by trapping and destroying part of the British fleet. On the contrary Scheer’s faith in further sorties was diminished and he became convinced that only by unrestricted submarine warfare could victory be won. Unhappily the British public, which had been encouraged by the press to expect another Trafalgar from Jellicoe, were neither inclined nor well enough informed to take such a sober and balanced view. Instead they vented much of their disappointment on the modest and unassuming admiral, who had no great talent for self-justification. Even when most of them gradually came round to realising that an important strategic success had been won, they could not regard it with enthusiasm.

A more positive aftermath of Jutland was the reorganisation of the fleet, to which Jellicoe instantly applied himself so successfully that his true greatness as a fleet commander has been said to lie in his capitalisation of the lessons of the battle. In August, however, when another sortie by Scheer gave him a second chance, the same combination of caution and bad luck frustrated it. As he converged on the unsuspecting Scheer one of his light cruisers was torpedoed by an unseen submarine and believed at first to have been mined. Fearing that he might be leading the fleet into a minefield, he turned back until the situation was clarified, losing four hours during which Scheer was warned of his proximity and fled.

By now the escalating German submarine campaign had become the crux of the war at sea, and Jellicoe realised that what mattered was no longer victory over the High Seas Fleet but over the submarine menace. In November he was transferred to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord to cope with this, Beatty succeeding him in command of the Grand Fleet. He had however little to add to the methods hitherto employed against the U-boats – patrolling dangerous areas with small craft and arming and strictly routeing merchantmen. Convoy was not resorted to except for troopships and some other specially important vessels, and Jellicoe shared the view of the bulk of the navy’s higher command that it could not be extended. Their arguments were that it would be impossible to find the necessary escort ships, and that merchantmen could not keep station in the way needed for convoy (which later experience showed to be untrue). It was argued too that a convoy system would involve loss of carrying power since vessels would make fewer voyages, and would create delays since convoys would have to travel below the speed of their slowest ships to leave a margin for station-keeping, and also because sudden influxes into our ports of masses of shipping at one time would mean congestion and slower turns-around.

In March 1917 however the Admiralty realised that its belief that escorts could not be provided had arisen partly from a gross miscalculation of the number of voyages needing protection in the ocean trades. In hopes of discouraging the enemy the totals of arrivals and departures of ships in its weekly statements had included the repeated calls of all coasters and short sea traders of over 300 tons, so that they appeared to average about 2500 a week each way. The Admiralty, in fact, had been hoist with its own propaganda. But when some sceptics among its junior personnel investigated these figures, the actual arrivals and departures in the ocean trades emerged as between 120 and 140 a week. In April, moreover, the entry of the United States into the war opened a prospect of more escort vessels, though as yet the American navy had not many of these. The Prime Minister, Lloyd George, had been convinced for some time that convoy was the sole remedy for what was now a critical situation, but when he pressed for it at a War Cabinet meeting on 23 April to which Jellicoe had been summoned, the latter replied that the obstacle was still shortage of destroyers, despite the possibility of American aid. On the 25th another War Cabinet to which he had not been called discussed the question again and decided that the Prime Minister should visit the Admiralty on the 30th to investigate further. But meanwhile Admiral Duff, the Director of the Anti-Submarine Division, had announced to Jellicoe his conversion to convoy and been instructed to draw up a minute recommending it, which he submitted on the 26th. Jellicoe approved it next day and a trial of it was immediately arranged, leaving Lloyd George little to do on the 30th but make himself pleasant. To his dying day Duff denied that the threat of the Prime Minister’s descent on the Admiralty had led to this rather abrupt decision to adopt convoy, insisting that he had been influenced only by the rising shipping losses. Jellicoe too, in his The Submarine Peril, published in 1934 as an attempted counterblast to some parts of Lloyd George’s War Memoirs, rejected all suggestions that in approving Duff’s minute he had been swayed by outside pressure. But it is just possible that despite making that statement in all good faith seventeen years later he may in fact have been influenced, if only subconsciously, to accelerate a step already under consideration by his knowledge (which Duff did not possess) of the Prime Minister’s intentions.

The adoption of convoy, however, did not transform the situation immediately, since the problem of finding sufficient escort vessels continued well into 1918, so that cause for anxiety and strain persisted till the end of Jellicoe’s tenure of office and took further toll of his health. To this may be traced in part the growing pessimism – or what to an optimist like Lloyd George seemed to be pessimism – which he now displayed. The Premier, eupeptic, intensely vital, indomitable and ruthless, was losing patience with a tired, over-conscientious man who could not delegate business, constantly overworked and always saw the black side of things too clearly. But his first reaction was to try to relieve Jellicoe of as much detail as possible by appointing Sir Eric Geddes, a railway tycoon who had been successfully organising transport behind the British lines in France, to take supreme charge of all naval and mercantile shipbuilding. Jellicoe however remained pessimistic, even about the convoy system, and at a War Cabinet in June declared that Britain could not continue the war in 1918 unless the Flanders offensive then being planned could capture the U-boat bases on the Belgian coast. This alarmist note caused Lloyd George to consider replacing him, but since he was not on good terms with the high command of the army he hesitated to take a step that might prejudice his relations with the navy too. Instead he made Geddes First Lord in place of Jellicoe’s friend and backer Sir Edward Carson and created the post of Deputy First Sea Lord for the popular and imperturbable Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, probably as a preliminary to putting him in Jellicoe’s place if opportunity offered. Jellicoe liked Wemyss, but his constitutional inability to delegate authority hamstrung the latter’s friendly efforts to help him, while his relations with Geddes steadily deteriorated owing to the new First Lord’s brusque manners and ignorance of naval courtesies and customs. On Christmas Eve Geddes, having obtained Wemyss’s reluctant consent to take over, suddenly dismissed him, denying afterwards that he had been influenced by Lloyd George. While it is hard to escape the conclusion that Jellicoe was no longer fitted to continue as First Sea Lord, it is equally hard not to regard the manner of his removal as shabby.

Several attempts were made during the rest of the war to find him employment, the most respectable being a proposal which fell through, that he should be made Allied Naval C-in-C in the Mediterranean. After the war he was given the important mission of touring the Empire to advise on the development of the Dominion navies, and in his report drew attention to Japan as the country from which future danger might arise. Afterwards he spent a happy and successful term as Governor-General of New Zealand, on his return from which the viscountcy he had received after his dismissal from the First Sea Lordship was converted into an earldom; and the last years of his life until his death in 1935 were divided between peaceful domesticity, dabbling in Conservative politics and the presidency of the British Legion in succession to Earl Haig.

Jutland had been the apex of his career. All that went before had led up to those few seconds of swift decision when, at the opening of the main battle, he had seized the advantage over Scheer. That was his greatest moment; the rest a long, slow anti-climax. There was a touch of Hamlet in him, and certainly for the British navy the times were out of joint. But the task which fell to him, not of setting them right but of adapting it to them, was in part beyond his powers. It would be going too far to ascribe to him – though he contributed to it – that continued over-reliance on the battleship and the big gun and renewed failure to appreciate the submarine threat to our seaborne trade which marked the higher command of the navy between the wars. That was due partly to over-confidence in Asdic as a defence against underwater attack; and in the 1930s it was Chatfield, Beatty’s man and never Jellicoe’s, who headed the ‘battleship school’. Nevertheless much of this failure stemmed from the lingering memory of Jutland. In repeated attempts to explain why the Grand Fleet had not succeeded in blowing its numerically weaker opponent out of the water the battle was refought again and again in the Tactical School and the Naval College, and fleet exercises at sea were still designed to bring about the great gun duel as their climax; while the study of the U-boat war against shipping and its lessons was neglected. The results were the staggering merchant-ship losses of the Second World War.

MARSHAL JOSEPH JOFFRE

General André Beaufre

After the Battle of the Marne General Joffre enjoyed unparalleled prestige and popularity. He had saved France and the country’s gratitude to him was frenetic. Later, as position warfare, punctuated by unproductive offensives, dragged on and Joffre’s attitude to the government became increasingly authoritarian, he became the target of much criticism and his star waned until eventually he was relieved of command of the armies on the transparent pretext of his elevation to Marshal of France. After the war, though growing in stature in some people’s eyes, Joffre’s personality and the part he had played in the Battle of the Marne were subjects of public discussion. Several books, such as Pierrefite’s GQG